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A Career Spanning Silent Movies, Talkies, Theater and Television |
It was, according to the film historian Kevin Brownlow, "one of the most racist films ever made in America." "Old San Francisco" (1927) featured a white actor playing a Chinese villain passing as a white man (got that?) who plans to sell an innocent white girl into white slavery until he is conveniently crushed by an earthquake. Before his grisly end he is aided in his nefarious scheme by an Asian character identified only as "a flower of the Orient," played by an ingénue named Anna May Wong. |
As Yunte Huang notes in "Daughter of the Dragon," his account of Wong's life and times, Hollywood was obsessed with the exoticism of Chinatown, yet roles for Asian actors were exceedingly few; it's therefore all the more remarkable that Wong, who was born in her father's Los Angeles laundry in 1905, was as productive as she was. Her career spanned silent movies, talkies and, eventually, television. She performed in vaudeville and live theater. She lived in Europe for a short stretch in the late 1920s, where she met the philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (who playfully called her "a Chinoiserie from the Old West") and had her picture taken with Leni Riefenstahl and Marlene Dietrich (who would later appear with Wong in "Shanghai Express"). Wong even performed in London's West End, impressing critics with her dancing while her co-star — a young Laurence Olivier — was roasted for his bad acting. |
Huang delights in details such as these — memorable yet mostly forgotten. He acknowledges there are other biographies of Wong, including Graham Hodges' "pioneering" volume and Anthony Chan's "Perpetually Cool." With "Daughter of the Dragon," Huang is offering something different, presenting this as the third volume of his "Rendezvous With America" trilogy, which has included books about Charlie Chan and the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker. "Daughter of the Dragon" is biography embedded in cultural criticism; the title itself is taken from one of Wong's most iconic (and cartoonish) roles, as the cruel and vengeful daughter of the evil Dr. Fu Manchu in the 1931 movie of the same name. |
Unlike "Daughter of the Dragon" the film, "Daughter of the Dragon" the book is clearly intended as a form of reclamation and subversion. Huang cites other scholars who have insisted that Wong's portrayal of a character who is, in Huang's blunt words, "devoid of humanity" was in fact a sly act of cultural sabotage. |
"Anna May drew attention to or even exploded the stereotype by overacting these roles," Huang writes, not entirely convincingly. After all, there's little indication that white audiences in the 1930s were primed to have such stereotypes "exploded." Huang himself documents the kind of casual ignorance and extreme bigotry Asian Americans faced at the time. The Chinese Exclusion Act was still in effect. Irony, as Julian Barnes has put it, "may be defined as what people miss." |
 | | Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich in "Shanghai Express."Paramount Pictures |
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Wong, for her part, defended her willingness to perform those roles as a matter of necessity. "When a person is trying to get established in a profession, she can't choose parts," she said. "She has to take what is offered." Especially when she is an Asian American woman at a time when Asian roles often went to white actors in adhesive tape and yellowface. The Production Code of 1930, which banned onscreen portrayals of miscegenation and interracial relationships, was a "virtual form of foot-binding for Anna May," Huang writes. It meant that she was often relegated to playing either a conniving dragon lady or a tragic Madame Butterfly. Even as she became famous in Hollywood, Wong was "a beauty no one was allowed to kiss." |
Read the rest of the story here. |
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